1. How should real-time monitoring be designed and utilized to strengthen existing early warning systems and support preventative policy responses to food crisis risk.
- Digital solutions will provide valuable globally aggregated and accurate realtime data about food production. Digital solutions are on their way to provide farmers with:
- Agronomic recommendations
- (micro)finance services
- (micro)agri-insurance services
These services can provide tremendous improvement in terms of productivity and resiliency for the food production system. In order to work properly, such solutions require real time data to be shared by farmers about crops, productions… This is key.
These data can feed big data & analytic solutions to aggregate information and having both a near real time feedback of harvests along with expected production (with some more sophisticated analytics).
- Internet of Things and satellite along with Cloud solutions will allow climate prediction to anticipate food shortage. IoT (Internet of Things) + BigData/Analytics can integrate existing satellite data with local AWS (Automatic Weather Stations) to estimate the impact of weather conditions on global & local farming area.
New generation smart sensors for agriculture will be simpler and cheaper enabling IoT at global scale. Farmers will benefit to invest few dollars to have real-time information about the soil & air humidity to fine tune irrigation and/or taking any agronomic choices (from seeding/harvest time to treatments). These additional data can be shared on anonymous base with larger data pools (in exchange of services such as software tool use providing agronomic recommendations, pricing information, etc.) further increasing the quantity and quality of climate data. Predictions about food production will not only be more and more accurate, but also more and more automatic.
Government incentives Local governments should support adoptions of such tools for instance incentivizing (*) innovative startups and large corporations to cooperate to launch innovative solutions. (*) policies, subsidies, credits, VC, tax holidays
Data privacy policies to incentive data exchange Key would be to define national and international simple but fair policies about data privacy to motivate data exchange.
Data to flow from “local data lake to global data ocean” Equivalently important would be having some sort of pragmatical protocol and format for data exchange among technologies and software to enable data to flow from local to global.
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2. What are examples of successful policy responses at country level that have been guided by existing monitoring tools?
Some platform to aggregate data at national and global level are already available. They should ideally further develop integrating with other local and global solutions (gov and business oriented). Following some examples:
INDIA: http://agriexchange.apeda.gov.in/
CGIAR: https://bigdata.cgiar.org/shared-services/
GODAN: https://www.godan.info/pages/about-open-data
AGRIROUTER: https://my-agrirouter.com/en/
IBM & YARA: (The Open Farm & Field Data Exchange) https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-01-23-Yara-and-IBM-launch-an-open-collaboration-for-farm-and-field-data-to-advance-sustainable-food-production
api-agro: https://api-agro.eu/en/the-platform/
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3. Local food prices are one way to get a temperature check of local market conditions, but high frequency local market price data is not widely available. Where are the gaps such as this one in real-time monitoring and how can these be addressed both in a research and policy context?
Research and policies should support the development of open digital platforms and standard for data exchanges. These frameworks require financial resources and international agreements, while are necessary to boost the development of INTEROPERABLE digital solutions to provide market services to farmers and buyers with an expected relevant increase of efficiency in the supply chain, market pricing and food waste reduction.
Once such solutions will be widely used and based on common framework for data exchange, it would be easy to AGGREGATE LOCAL DATA AT GLOBAL LEVEL. Cloud analytics software could be developed to receive anonymized data flows from local & global digital platforms allowing to have a real time global assessment of prices and food availability.
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4. Advances in early warning technologies and data must be matched by developing capacity within institutions at the country and regional level to transform relevant data into preventative actions. What is needed to initiate and scale up the use of real-time monitoring in early warning early action systems by regional organizations, national governments, and other country level institutions? What are the technical and policy-related challenges associated with the use of such tools?
The currently available solutions and technologies have already successfully proven to support agriculture on several levels:
- production (agronomic recommendations, water saving, costs optimizations,…),
- financial (credits, insurances),
- market (global and local trading solutions)
- and logistic (supply chain)
The digital adoption just started and the opportunities ahead are tremendous.
Which policies / actions can help? Local and global ecosystem allowing cooperation among public & private, local & global in a sustainable way would further promote digital solutions adoption. Incentives to farmers that adopt digital technologies can boost adoption as well. In micro-insurances several countries are supporting farmers with subsidies. Ideally similar approaches are taken to support farmers that intend to adopt smart sensors, digital agronomic recommendations, data sharing ...
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5. Over the years, a series of different early warming early action systems have been developed by various organizations. How could greater collaboration among the various tools and approaches facilitate their effectiveness in driving policy responses?
Open and free platforms for agriculture data collection, storage and exchange in an anonymized way should be developed and made available to the international community of researchers and developers.
Standardization about data exchange is required as it was during the railway’s standardization at the end of XIX century. Once the above is available, business incentives would do the rest.
Mr. Marco Brini